Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Kutcho Copper (TSX-V: KC) CEO Vince Sorace on Significant Resource Expansion at Kutcho Copper Project, British Columbia, Canada

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of Kutcho Copper — Mr. Vince Sorace. Vince, what a difference a couple of months make! 

A couple of months ago, I was hooting and hollering… asking everyone to buy this stock at the C$0.20, C$0.25 level. Here we are a couple of months later; you're at 52-week highs. You're trading at C$0.53, C$0.54.

You had some exciting news today! You updated the resource estimate. Really, really good numbers. I'd love for you to provide an overview for us.

Vince Sorace: Sure. Thanks again for having me, Gerardo! Yeah, it's been good. It's been exciting. In the copper market, we've been seeing this coming for a while. We've got wind in our sails right now. I mean, copper is trading at $3.75-ish right now, which just does wonders for projects, copper projects, and especially projects like Kutcho. 

The leverage to copper prices are incredible for us. I think that will all be shown definitively when we release our feasibility study numbers. So we're very excited about that.

But yeah, the updated resource estimate was a good start to this… just kind of showing everybody what we're working off of. And, ultimately, what that does is it turns into the reserve number working through the feasibility study. There's a correlation; higher resources turning to some more reserves. So that's what we're excited about. 

These numbers now kind of reflect all of the hard work we did over the last couple of years; upgrading the project through our resource expansion drilling and more so through the metallurgical recoveries that we spent some time on last year getting to improve recoveries over the past. 

So that all reflects in what we have to work with here, within the resource, and, ultimately, the value of the project.

Gerardo Del Real: Really good work. Let's go through the details. The updated estimate includes an 8% increase in the Measured & Indicated (M&I) tonnage and a 24% increase in the Inferred tonnage. 

You now have updated mineral resources of 18.6 million tonnes of M&I at 2.58% copper equivalent and 13.2 million tonnes of Inferred at 1.59%. You mentioned the metallurgical work that you spent some time and money on. That's proven valuable. 

The increase in resource, obviously, is going to add to the bottom line. And last but definitely not least, there is still significant exploration upside. Can we speak to that a bit and your plans for that moving forward, Vince?

Vince Sorace: Definitely. That's something very important here. We're already, I would say, at the upper echelon in the spectrum of size with respect to VMS deposits. There is lots of upside potential left here. 

What we spoke to in this press release were more of the brownfields targets… the stuff that we have a high degree of confidence that is there. So drilling around the existing resource lenses; the deposits that are there. In between them, below them… we've got high levels of confidence that this gets bigger. 

Listen, we didn't do this over the last couple of years because of our cost of capital. When the markets are offline and it's expensive to raise money when your stock's too cheap… it doesn't make sense from an economic perspective to be out there drilling those holes. 

But things have changed now with our stock being up and interest in the space being much more robust. This now lends itself to being something that is economic; raising additional exploration capital now and going out and tackling this.

So, yeah, there's lots of room to expand this project. And this is, again, from a brownfields perspective. And let's not forget – and we haven't touched on it yet but you will see me touching on it soon – is that this is a district play and we have locked up the Kutcho formation or the rocks that host these deposits. 

There are lots of blue sky greenfields targets that we're going to start paying close attention to this year as well. So there's a chance – and we're working on that right now – that we can raise some money and get back in the field and do a bunch of stuff. So that would include some of these newer resource targets as well as some greenfields targets.

Gerardo Del Real: The feasibility study is still on-track for June it looks like?

Vince Sorace: Feasibility study is on-track for June. We're moving through that very, very well, on-time and on-budget.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent! Vince, not a lot of brownfields projects with the tonnage and the grades. Look, we've seen the numbers before, right? The margins; still a lot of upside. Congrats on the run… but again, it's early days for Kutcho… a lot of runway left!

Vince Sorace: I agree.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks for your time, Vince. Look forward to having you back on soon. Appreciate it!

Vince Sorace: Thanks, Gerardo! 

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